I am a big fan of Nicolas Winding Refn's film Bonson from 2009. For that reason alone, I went to see Valhalla Rising, which looked like a big piece of shit in the trailers I saw beforehand. Well, I should learn a less and believe my eyes more than the past work of a filmmaker because this film is even more of a turd than I expected it to be.
There is basically no story here, but what I can best make out is that there is a guy named One Eye (Mads Mikkelsen), who is a tattooed slave in what might be England or Scotland or Scandinavia (with British accents) in the middle ages, who comes from a world of horrible violence. He escapes is current owners and kills them all. Then a young boy comes over and begins to follow him. At some point they meet a group of guys who are going to the Holy Land on a crusade. He follows them for awhile too. Then some more people die in extremely violent and bloody ways.
Throughout the story One Eye has weird fractured flashbacks to extreme violence he has seen in his life and visions of the world through a red filter (which I guess means something about blood). There is a lot of nothing going on too. We see people staring off into the distance blankly and then we see vast natural expanses or waterscapes with nothing going on. This gets pretty tedious.
The photography, by Morten Søborg is actually wonderful and looks very blue-green throughout. It is always foggy and gray, but there are glimpses of wonderful colors. If these plastic images don't do anything emotionally or story-wise, at least they look nice.
I really feel like I'm missing something with this film. It almost comes off as an art piece, more than a narrative, but I don't think that on purpose. I think it just has a bad script and bad execution without any of the poetry or beauty of his earlier work.
Stars: 1 of 4
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No, I think you should always depend more on the track record of a director than any trailer. If he's done good work in the past, you should go see his next film (or two). I kind of dug this acid trip of a movie, which was like a Viking movie directed by Tarkovsky. Not actually good, but ominous and moody as hell.
ReplyDelete